Author: cdwan

“It takes no special training, beyond learning to relax and trust the robot.”

I find that I don’t have the heart for even a perfunctory Ironman reference. Make it up yourself.

PT sucks. These people are canny. They know how to watch the opposite hand and increase the weight until I’m still not complaining, but am crushing all hell out of the handful of curtain I’ve grabbed. They tend to turn up the pain to “sheen of sweat on the forehead.” I’ve been warned that tomorrow we’re going to “turn up the workouts.” Lovely. If pain is weakness leaving the body, then I’m either getting strong, or I’ll be out of weakness soon.

The PT folks work in teams. Most of the teams appear to be made up of a male senior therapist and his team of buxom female assistants. Mine is a male senior therapist and his very intelligent, competent male assistants, all of whom have all done judo in the past. I have no idea of the competence of the other teams, but mine are awesome, and the other teams are welcome to work in the same space that we’re using.

redmed had a further medical adventure today, briefly incapacitating her other foot. This lead to my rapid return from Providence to Boston. Her grand-boss (boss’s boss) met me with my wife in a wheelchair in the lobby of the hospital.

We decided that the scooter makes an acceptable wheelchair, provided that someone is around to push / pull you around. It gets really funny if the person being pushed / pulled makes “VROOM” noises as you push her onto the elevator.

–UPDATE–

I had forgotten the abomination, the horror, that is commercials. They are interspersed, interpolated into my Battlestar Galactica.

I had previously been able to settle in and accept the raw suck of the fourth season … the random re-scattering of the characters and plotlines to support some contrived conclusion … the total departure from the coolest parts of the series and the embracing of the worst law drama aspects.

But commercials?

Brooks has a decent Op-ed piece in the NY Times today.

In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate. The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It’s going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism.

In case you missed high school civics, here’s how the US political circus works:

1) The parties have a strong financial interest in tightly contested elections:

Political donations scale with the perceived importance of the election. Therefore, the political parties have a financial incentive to keep the races close. The parties, by which I mean the career staffers and strategists making strategic decisions, make their money off of donations. Those donations come in from people who are convinced that it’s really important right now to keep / get the Democrats / Republicans in office. In an uncontested election, the only one who benefits is the actual candidate. There’s no money for the parties in an uncontested election. The parties will therefore act to make sure that as many races as possible are hotly contested.

You don’t need secret bipartisan meetings in smoky rooms to get an implicit agreement on that one. It’s obvious on the face of it that close races are of massive, financial benefit to both parties.

2) The media has a strong financial interest in keeping the races tightly contested

The media, by which I mean “the television, radio, and newspaper companies who make the majority of their money off of advertising sales,” has a similar financial incentive to keep the races hot. Most of the money in a campaign is spent on television ads. Any individual media company can see that the hotter the race – the more political ads will be purchased. In an election year, media companies can choose the size of their market. Any smart company in that situation chooses “larger.”

Consider that fact for another second – I want to be clear: The two groups most directly responsible for defining the tone of political discourse in the US are the ones who stand to make large amounts of money if only they can make the race bitterly divisive and too close to call right up until election day.

Again, I’m not positing any secret back-room alliances. This is way too obvious to require them.

3) The Democrats and the Republicans agree that the next president must either be a Democrat or a Republican

I harp on this a lot, but it bears repeating. Politicians may have an interest in good governance, but parties do not. Parties are interested in keeping power. Therefore, we can expect the two dominant parties to fight tooth and nail to prevent the emergence of any new parties, or any change in the system.

Risking what called “a whole new plane of cynicism,” here’s my synthesis:

The presidential race was scheduled to be a blowout in favor of the Democrats. The country was in agreement on the major planks of foreign and domestic policy (slow down the war effort and focus on the economy mostly by regulating the finance industry). Instead of letting that simple fact ride through the process, we have the longest and most expensive Democratic primary in history. Along the way, the Democrats have hurt themselves badly enough that the “real” campaign is expected to be quite close … right up to election day.

Now this is some data recovery.

Columbia’s fragments were painstakingly and exhaustively collected. Amongst them was a 400MB Seagate hard drive which was in the sort of shape you think it would be in after being in an explosive fire and then hurled to earth from several miles up with a ferocious impact.

The Kroll people managed to recover 90 percent or so of the 400MB of data from the drive with its cracked and burned casing.

Much though I try to avoid it, I sometimes accidentally read a newspaper headline. Today’s seemed to indicate the same damn thing I read back in January “OBAMA WINS! HILLARY IS TOAST!” I doubt very much that it’ll stick this time around either. I *want* Hillary to stay in. Here’s why:

I really, really hope that Bill and Hillary cash all their political chips to obviously and completely subsume the popular will (within the Democrats) to their own. They have both the accumulated favors, and the sheer bull-headed force of will to do this.

I further hope that Obama is irate enough at having won the popular vote but lost on some sort of technicality that he takes his voters and his electoral mandate and starts up his very own third party (or perhaps heads up one of the other third parties already on the ballots).

I believe that this would *not* simply throw the election to the republicans. Hear me out:

I believe that there is a solid 10% of the Republican party who would *love* to come over to the Clinton camp, but they really can’t get over the idea of voting for a party filled with non-white people. If Hillary runs, I think those people would vote for her rather than McCain.

I believe that there is a non-overlapping 10% of the Republican party who are middle class non-white people. They have always been vaguely uncomfortable with the party of the conservative white folks, but they tend to hate the Clintons and their union supporting, amoral triangulation with a passion. Those people would stampede over to Obama rather than vote for McCain.

Assuming that Hillary and Obama are 50 – 50 within the democrats, and that the democrats and republicans are 50 -50 nationally, that gives us a nice 30 – 30 – 30 split THIS YEAR.

Seriously. 10% here and 10% there is all it would take.

— UPDATE —

I can’t believe that none of my language-lawyer math-geek friends called me on my glaring math error. If 10% of the republicans, who are themselves 50% of the registered populace, defected … that would be 5% of the electorate. My math above leads to a republican win by 40%.

However I think that the point still stands, I just need two out of 5 rather than two out of 10 republicans to defect.

1) Approximately how much real value has dropped out of the economy with this housing mess we’re in? I’m talking about the bottom line, which really ought to be just the debts that won’t be paid when people can’t cover their mortgages. We’re currently shuffling the chairs around, but I’m curious how much the banks actually lost. My totally uneducated guess is $6 Trillion. That’s about $20k lost by each American, which feels close enough to be accurate.

One benefit of having this number in hand is that we’ll be able to tell when the “unexpected losses” might be expected to let up. Once the banks write off a total of $6T in losses, then we can settle down and invest again. Until then, it’s screw and be screwed because there are still chairs to be taken away.

2) If the price of oil were controlled by supply and demand, approximately where might it end up? I ask this one because that’s the price point that the non-oil based energy folks should be aiming for. I’m curious how one might do this math.

3) Does anyone really believe that the “DC Madam,” Deborah Palfrey, actually just packed her stuff and killed herself in a shed in Florida? Damn. Now I *really* want to know her client list.

— UPDATE —

The headlines that I’m reading about Palfrey imply that her “never spending a day in prison” comments were somehow linked to suicidal thoughts. Here’s the quote in full:

“I’m sure as heck not going to be going to federal prison for one day, let alone four to eight years, because I’m shy about bringing in the deputy secretary of whatever,” Palfrey told ABC last year when she released phone records that revealed some of her clients. “Not for a second. I’ll bring every last one of them in if necessary.”

That’s not a meek little “I’d rather die,” that’s a full throated “I’ll take all you bastards down with me.”

I find it disingenuous that a paper as reputable as the Washington Post would head their article with “`D.C. madam’ who vowed not to go to prison kills herself”.

I shouldn’t be allowed to read the internet late at night. I get all agitated.

Ironman is a damn good movie. It’s not high art, it’s only notionally “about people,” but I consider my entertainment dollar well spent on that one.

I started a batch of beer last week. An “american cream ale” out of a kit. I’ve got the makings for a whole bunch of different batches, as well as a year’s worth of home-grown hops in the freezer … but I decided to test out the new kitchen gently. Plus, I want some beer in the fridge that might be palatable to people who are not me.

All went smoothly, and today was the one week point at which I “racked” the beer out of the 6 gallon pail (“primary fermentation vessel”) and into the 5.5 gallon glass carboy for “secondary” fermentation. It tastes a little green, and is perhaps a bit hoppy (besides being warm and uncarbonated) … but that’s nothing to worry about at this point.

The matter of some concern was the 1.5 inch thick yeast cake, the “trub” at the bottom of the pail. That’s an unusual amount of dead yeast. Generally, I see perhaps half an inch. Out of the entire brewing process, there is only one part that is actually gross. There are annoying parts, all the dish washing, but the only really gross step is when you have a really thick cake of spent yeast. Washing it out looked like nothing so much as washing soft poop out of the bottom of a bucket. Of course it *smelled* like hoppy, malty, yeast. That’s all good … but the visual stays with me.

Anybody up for a beer?